For example, Nick Fuentes, the perma-smirking king of the racial Right, describes Usha Vance as a “foreigner” and a “jeet,” mocks her name (“what the fuck is that?”), and blames her husband for “race-mixing.” Fuentes, who boasts a million followers on X, is having a something of a moment, with Kevin Roberts, the president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, going to bat for him (before apologizing some half a dozen times). But many lesser e-pundits share Fuentes’s views; even a Department of Government Efficiency staffer has called for normalizing “Indian hate.” 

At the intersection of these crosswinds stands Nikki Haley’s son, Nalin. The scion of one of America’s most prominent Indian families, he has shot to online fame in recent months, after he went public with his religious conversion (to Catholicism) and let loose his political opinions — ones that often clash with his family’s.

For one thing, Haley isn’t shy about venting his weariness of immigration of all kinds, not least from India. When Vivek Ramaswamy called for an “end [to] identity politics” this week, Haley replied, “End H1-B visas,” the program used by firms, especially in tech, to import latter-day indentured servants, more than 70% of whom are Indian.

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“We don’t just stop illegal immigration,” Haley tells me by Zoom on Tuesday. “I think we need to stop legal immigration.” With green eyes, impossibly white teeth, and six-pack abs, he cuts a striking figure. He is well-versed in meme warfare and knows just how to “ratio” accounts much bigger than his own — that is, garner more “likes” for his replies than the original poster. Like that of the British-born progressive pundit Mehdi Hasan, with whom he’s repeatedly tussled. 

When I mention his demand that Hasan be “denaturalized,” he interrupts: “and deported.” Tongue in cheek, surely? “No, I quite literally mean that. I’m often sarcastic, but not in this case. I mean, he hates America. If you hate America, you shouldn’t be in America. … Everyone wants to make it so complicated. That’s the thing with the past generation. They always talk about the rules, regulations, process. No, it’s simple. If you don’t like America, get out.”

That’s not how American naturalization works legally, and the e-Right’s calls to denaturalize and deport any immigrant who says the “wrong” thing clashes sharply with both constitutional writ and the spirit of the American tradition. And if that sort of thing were all that Nalin Haley stood for, he could easily be dismissed as just another online loudmouth (albeit, one who puts his name and face to his fulminations). 

Yet behind his bravado is a serious-minded 24-year-old recent graduate emerging from the political shadow cast by his mother. Nikki Haley served as a lawmaker in South Carolina, became the state’s governor, and was tapped as UN ambassador by Donald Trump in his first term before unsuccessfully challenging him for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. Her son’s rage — and that of his Gen-Z-male cohort — is a predictable consequence of policies promoted by that older generation of conservatives, who prized cheap labor and free-market dogma far above America’s internal stability and cohesion. 

Nikki Haley supported legal, merit-based immigration as part of a pro-business platform. Her son wants to close the border entirely. Nikki Haley believes “it is not that Israel needs America — America needs Israel.” Her son thinks “Israel is just another country, and if they want to have a better relationship with the United States, they need to stop interfering in our politics.” Nikki Haley believes in an expansive foreign policy. Her son wants to end all foreign aid “as long as we have unemployment, people below the poverty line, medical debt, and bad schools.”

These domestic ills aren’t abstractions to him. “My friend group from high school, all graduated, great degrees from great schools,” he says. “It’s been a year and a half, and not one of them has a job — not one. So I’m angry at that, because I’m having to try and help my friends get jobs when their parents got jobs immediately — not just after graduating college, but out of high school.”

Statistics bear this out: in September, the share of the long-term unemployed, those who’ve been out of the job market for more than six months, hit 26%, according to The New York Times, much of it driven by recent graduates. The jobs that are available for recent grads are often precarious or temporary. “So when you see a bunch of foreigners coming over here to take jobs that [my friends] wanted,” Haley says, “they have every right to be pissed, and I’m pissed for them.”

It isn’t about jobs alone. “I look at the housing market,” he says, “and I don’t see how I’m ever going to own a house. And I do very well for someone my age” — he works in finance on the South Carolina side of Charlotte — “and I still don’t see it.” Again, the generational discontent: “My parents bought their first house for $90,000. I mean, that house probably now is worth $400,000. How can we compete?”

Then there’s the rising crime and disorder. “I live in what is known as a very safe area,” he explains. “Yet someone got shot and killed outside my apartment complex a couple months ago. . .  Outside my apartment in that same couple months, someone got jumped for a bad drug deal. And I’m tired of having to go to CVS to push a button for an employee to come unlock the toothpaste for me. Like, that’s ridiculous.”

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Overall, the effect is akin to “living in some fake world, some fake TV show,” he says. “We are the United States of America, we don’t do this. Things should be safe. Things should work. People should have jobs. Houses should be affordable.” If the son of Nikki Haley feels this way, it’s not hard to imagine the depths of anger and despair among less privileged Zoomers, a reality that probably explains, at least in part, the cohort’s often-brutal political rhetoric.

Nalin Haley was four years old when his mother was elected to the state House of Representatives. But things really changed when she was first elected governor, in 2010. Nalin and his sister, Rena, he recalls, “didn’t know that we had to live in this big house that’s also a museum” — the governor’s mansion.

When they arrived, the main housekeeper asked the two children what they wanted to eat. “And you know, we were very simple. We were like, ‘Well, what do you have?’ And she said, ‘Everything.’ We, having grown up very simple, we just asked for grilled cheese.” By his own account, Nalin’s parents — the governor and her husband, the businessman and military officer Michael Haley — kept him humble. All through childhood, including the years spent in the governor’s mansion, he had to do chores and was expected to work summer jobs.

On matters religious, however, Nalin Haley had to carve his own path. Beginning when he was in fourth grade, his maternal grandparents, Indian-born Sikhs, lived with the family and served almost as surrogate parents amid the political storms of those years. “I had my parents being [Protestant] Christian, and my grandparents being Sikh. As a result, I was very confused.” Which of these faith teachings was true?

To answer that question for himself, Haley absorbed books on world religions when other kids were reading about cars and dinosaurs. Eventually, thanks in part to a spiritual experience he’s reluctant to divulge, he concluded that Christianity is the true faith. He would go on to attend Villanova University, a Catholic institution in Philadelphia. Yet it wasn’t until after graduation that he was received into full communion with the Roman church.

“I needed to research my own faith better in terms of the history, the early beliefs, the Church Fathers,” he says. “When I did that, I felt as though anyone who does that kind of research will walk away a Catholic.” In his choice of denomination, too, Haley is representative of his generational cohort of Gen-Z men, an influential subset of whom is turning to Christianity — and specifically, to liturgically traditional communions like Catholicism and Orthodoxy.

In parallel to his spiritual conversion, he also began to develop his own distinct political ideas — not always the case in other political families like, say, the Cheneys. “I was not just going to have the same political views as my parents,” he says. Yes, he supported his mother in the 2024 Republican primary, but he did this, he insists, mostly to be a “good son.” All along, “I didn’t and was never going to be an advocate for a view that I did not have.” He repeats this point several times, almost like a mantra — a loyal son, but not a political disciple.

Yet when it comes to his views on immigration, critics from both the Left and the Right insist on seeing him as something other than his own man. He’s received his share of racist abuse from the toxic sewers of the online Right, notwithstanding his Christian faith and hard-line restrictionist views on immigration. “I just don’t let it bother me,” he says. “The internet’s not a real place necessarily. It is in some sense, but it’s also not. … I know who I am.”

As for one of the main sources of the racist sludge, Fuentes, Haley insists he’s barely watched the former’s show and doesn’t know his views. “I have no idea what to say about him or what to think about him,” Haley says. “And none of my friends really know about him, either.” I find that hard to believe, given Fuentes’s enormous influence among Zoomers. Still, it’s a relief to hear Haley add that racial animosity is out of the question for him: “As a Christian, I can’t have that. As a Christian, Jesus told me to love everybody, including groups of people who I don’t agree with.”

He goes on: “I get it from both sides. Someone who is biracial, only someone who is biracial can understand the feeling that … You can never feel one way or the other, because one way or the other, those two groups will never fully see you as them.” Christianity, it seems to me, serves as the bridge between these social realms for him — and could do so in an increasingly fractured American polity, if we’re lucky. 

The Left, meanwhile, reproaches him for backing an immigration policy that, if it had been in effect when his grandparents immigrated from India, would have barred them from entry — thus, in a sense, foreclosing his own existence. That line, too, leaves him unfazed. “It’s not 1969,” he shrugs. “It’s just not. We have a different country. We have a different set of circumstances.” It’s reasonable, then, to “adapt” and to “have different policies.”

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In 2025, “we have lawlessness, we have crime, we have unemployment. We have all these issues. So my first thought isn’t, ‘Well, what happened in the past, and how could we have changed the past?’ Because we’re not living in the past. We’re living right now. And so my thought is, ‘What can we do to stop the lawlessness, the unemployment, the housing crisis?’ ”

The 21st-century economy, he worries, won’t produce enough of the kind of high-wage jobs that defined middle-class prosperity in his parents’ and grandparents’ time. If the future is scarce service-sector jobs, why import more unskilled labor to undercut already low wages for such work among native-born workers? “A lot of people are just going to lose their jobs. They’re just going to be sitting around without jobs. And the next thing you know, you’re going to have people saying, ‘We need UBI,’” or universal basic income.

The economic pressure on his generation, he fears, will compound existing trends toward loneliness and alienation, especially between Gen-Z men and women.

“The future of division in America,” he speculates, “is not going to be about race. It’s probably not going to be about income, although that is a big disparity. It’s going to be about gender. It’s going to be men on one side, women on the other. If you look at someone’s” — algorithmically curated — “‘For You’ page on TikTok or on Instagram, for a young man it’s going to be completely different from a young woman’s.”

Gen-Z women are veering sharply to the Left: an overwhelming majority just voted for Zohran Mamdani in New York City. Meanwhile, Gen-Z men like Haley are shifting to the Right, and even the very hard Right that sometimes plays out as crass misogyny online, thus deepening the mutual alienation of the sexes. Yet, Haley wonders, it might not be as hopeless as all that, because both parties are responding to the same set of frustrations: “They’re tired of modernity. They’re tired of technology. All of this modernity is not natural to them.”

What both sexes desperately need, he says, is time together — in person. “They’re being more anti-social,” he observes of his cohort. “Their attention spans are getting shorter. So they only see what’s on the phone. That means that in terms of race, if all you see about a certain race is what you see on your phone, you’re going to have that view of them. If all you see about a certain gender is on your phone, you’re going to think that about them.”

He adds: “But make no mistake, the future of Gen Z, regardless of its men or women, is nationalist.” When I ask him whom he prefers among the suspected contenders for the 2028 Republican nomination, he suggests that JD Vance comes closest but says the vice president needs to “somehow work on his charisma, aura, and likability.” And if the immediate slate of political contenders on the Right aren’t up to the task, Nalin Haley is prepared to enter the arena himself.

“I want someone to fight for me,” he says. “And if no one’s fighting for me, then I’m going to fight for myself and those around me who are suffering.” His anger is often palpable. At times, it’s discomfiting. It’s also, I must admit, at least partly justified. Mere hectoring moralism, without more, will do little to assuage it. Reforming the material substrate beneath that generational rage should be the foremost task of both parties. 

She is very good at what she does. But, then, making money runs in Rao’s family — as it does with many Indian activists in the United States, who have become leaders in the battle against ‘white supremacy’.

Though it is true that in many ways Rao is atypical, and almost a caricature of the sort of activist found on social media, she reflects important visible strands of the Indian-American experience. The daughter of upper-caste southern Indian immigrants to the United States, her parents were doctors, which is not exceptional since nearly one out of every 20 doctors in the United States is of Indian origin, and somewhere in the region of one in 20 Indian Americans has a medical degree.

Not surprisingly, the median Indian-American household income is nearly twice that of white Americans, and as well as medicine many others are in prestigious, highly-paid industry — including Sara Rao’s husband, who works in finance and private equity.

Across the English-speaking world, and in particular the United States, people of Indian origin, and South Asians more broadly, are becoming more culturally influential. This is quite a turnaround; in the 1980s the most prominent person of South Asian origin depicted in American pop culture was Ben Jabituya in the Short Circuit sequel, played by Fisher Stevens, a white actor. Today, in contrast, there is an embarrassment of riches: comedians such as Aziz Ansari and Mindy Kaling; politicians such as Kamala Harris and Nikki Haley; television doctors such as Sanjay Gupta.

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Though there are many examples of Indian Americans on the political Right, namely Haley, Ajit Pai or Seema Verma in the Trump administration, most of the public figures today are Democrats. Pramila Jayapal is a hard-left member of the Democratic Party representing a district in Washington state; though her colleague Ro Khanna represents Silicon Valley, and began his career as a member of the pro-business faction of the party, he also co-chaired Bernie Sanders’s recent campaign for President; Sanders’s campaign manager was Faiz Shakir, a Pakistani-American. Indian-American adjacent, as it were.

The Center for American Progress, the major Democrat-leaning think-tank in Washington, D.C., is led by an Indian-American, Neera Tanden, while Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s long-time influential chief of staff was Saikat Chakrabarti, who left to head Left-wing pressure groups in the party.

This lopsided representation among political elites is reflected in voting patterns: in 2016 just 16% of Indian-Americans voted for Donald Trump, even though they are on average economically advanced and have high educational attainment. In the private sector, and unlike East Asians, people of South Asian origin are not underrepresented in managerial positions.

There is a reason that many are wont to call Indians the “new Jews,” a culturally prominent ethnic group overrepresented in academia, media and business, and who tend to be socially liberal and Democrat-voting.

This liberalism extends to attitudes on race. Bracketed as “Asians,” Indian-Americans are subject to the same discrimination in selective higher education as other Asians, but on the whole have not led opposition to the practice — which is largely the result of attempts to increase African-American representation on campus.

Black Americans have a very distinctive identity on the US landscape, as do Native Americans. Though the Latino/Hispanic category was only created in 1970, it alludes to a sharply delimited group of people with origins in Central and South America. But as brown-skinned people who are Asian-Americans, Indians occupy a grey zone in America’s racial taxonomy, categorised in the same bracket as Chinese, Koreans and Japanese. This has often led to some perverse scenarios within the country’s complex racial politics and its hierarchy of oppression.

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Saira Rao grew up in wealthy Richmond, Virginia, and went to the elite University of Virginia, then New York University law school, and even wrote a novel published in 2007 while she was clerking for a judge. By all rights, she is the child of modest privilege, with little to distinguish her from her upper-middle-class peers.

But Rao, like many Indian-Americans, is also a scion of centuries of privilege in India. Private survey research indicates that 25% of Indian-Americans are Brahmin, the highest caste in Hindu society — who comprise less than 5% of people back at home. Virtually no Indian-Americans are Dalits, who in India are 15% of the population, and today receive affirmative action due to centuries of oppression.

Compared to class differences in western countries, caste barriers in India are enormous and ingrained, and genetic studies indicate that they go back 1,500 years. To the Indian-American upper-middle-class privilege is bestowed as a family heirloom, far older and more ingrained than the white variety.

But in 21st-century America we do not talk much about class. We talk about race. When “black and brown” is used as an incantation it is not surprising that many young Indians are attracted to the idea that they, too, are among the wretched of the earth.

So you see young people of a bronze shade with names such as Iyer, Mukherjee and Tripathi, claiming for themselves the centuries of oppression and trauma of others, American history adopted and co-opted. They decry white supremacy which confirmed upon their ancestors’ their ancient ritual purity during the colonial period — for the forefathers of these Iyers, Mukherjees and Tripathis were the rural landowners of British India; they were the Indians who manned the colonial civil service. But before that, their privileges went back centuries, long before the United States existed and indeed even before England or France emerged.

American history is unique, and its own “caste system” is racially inflected into a bipolar framework: black or white. Only in the past few decades have terms such as “people of colour” allowed for the assimilation of other minorities, whether it be Latino, Native American or Asian. But while black Americans have a particular history, other minorities are diverse in their experiences. What does an Asian-American child of Hmong refugees have in common with the Asian-American child of Indian doctors? And yet both grow up in a world defined by slavery, the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.

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Young Indian-Americans can easily identify themselves as people of colour, because in the American social landscape what matters is their brown complexion, not thousands of years of hereditary caste privilege. And while America has a rich textured vocabulary to talk about race, it has little in the way of discussion on the matter of class. Indian-American professionals can neglect their own privilege while highlighting their racial disadvantage because that is how the American cultural system is set up.

It is a system that benefits them on many levels, since as well-prepared meritocrats they are equipped and conditioned to optimise any advantages and arbitrage away inefficiencies. It is natural that the language of systemic racism designed for the black American experience can easily be leveraged by verbally-gifted members of the professional-managerial class who happen to have brown skin.

Saira Rao is a lawyer; her stock and trade are words. Though among Indian-Americans it is widely debated whether she is sincere or an opportunist, the fact is that an American system emphasising racial identity in a Manichaean conflict between whites and people of colour will naturally create strong incentives for some to exploit it.

Upper-caste Indian-Americans who descend from centuries of privilege, and grow up in American suburban comfort, do not need to face up to the consideration of class, because American culture as a whole does not engage economic inequality forthrightly and directly. As long as it focuses only on social ills with a racial origin, and sees the world in such black and white terms, then people with hundreds of years of privilege behind them will continue to lead the wretched of the earth.